The Apple website is always slow for me, no matter what browser I use and there are times when it is almost unusable. Using Safari helps (no surprise there), but on the whole the experience is disappointing.
The MobileMe web portal is also very slow indeed and makes the simple task of dealing with emails, looking through the gallery and managing my calendar quite painful at times. The service is inconsistent at best and sometimes it will work OK, but at others is just too slow to bother with. Again, using Safari helps a little, but not enough to make it worthwhile.
iTunes is on the whole quicker when browsing apps, music and the like and the experience is way better than the two above. However, syncing and backing up are dog slow in comparison to their peers and this all leaves me with one question.
Why are most Apple online products so much slower than the likes of Google and other competing services and why do we rarely hear complaints about them? More than anything I am curious to know if you have the same issues as me.
I’ve found the main Apple website’s performance changes depending on where I’m connecting from. At work it’s really slow, which is annoying as we get educational discounts on some things and so I’ll always check the prices there first. However, from home (cable) it’s much slicker.
However, even the improved version of mobileme is very slow from home. I switched to using google calendar a while back because of this. At least apple have a better contacts system than google which unhelpfully adds the details of almost anyone it feels like.